Chase fees may cost customers more cash per month

Chase wants more fast cash from customers who are audacious enough to be poor and bank with them. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Chase banking customers will soon start to see more cash going out the door in bank fees. Major banks are raising account fees left and right, as apparently even the biggest banking organizations are hard up for money. Regulations have made covert bank fees harder to institute.

Bank fees rise for least wealthy of Chase customers

JP Morgan Chase is raising the fees on some checking accounts that receive direct deposits that will cost the least wealthy of Chase customers more fast cash for the egregious act of simply banking with one of the nations’ largest banks, according to USA Today. Chase will be assessing a $6 fee on accounts that receive direct deposits if a deposit is less than $500. Say a person gets one $495 direct deposit and a $1,000 deposit of pay day cash into a Chase account every month. That person will end up with a $6 account fee because one of the deposits is less than $1,000 and that person had the audacity to not be rich while banking with JPMorgan Chase. The fees take effect in February of 2011.

Punishment of the poor

The people who will end up getting hit with the fees and having to advance cash to Chase for having an account that receives deposits with them are the most vulnerable. Mostly, it will be retirees and the unemployed. Many people receive unemployment benefits that total less than $500 per check, and about 7 percent of people living off of Social Security benefits receive $500 or less as well. Apparently, if a multi-billion dollar corporation needs money now, the best source for it is people who really do need money now.

Even the largest banks need money

Major banks, such as Chase and Bank of America are thought of as virtuous bastions of capitalism but have begun notoriously raising bank fees in the open as regulations make it harder for them to do so covertly. For instance, a bank cannot automatically enroll a person in overdraft protection without asking them first. Overdraft fees are one of the largest sources of revenue for banking institutions.